Gold has staged a fabulous rally from about $1220 to $1245. Using the December futures price chart, I’ve defined the $1300 – $1350 area as a spectacular profit booking opportunity for investors. Please click here now. Double-click to enlarge this gold chart. I’m an eager gold bullion seller now, but I’m less eager to sell gold stocks or silver bullion. That’s because they have not taken out their February highs while ‘Queen Gold’ has done so easily. Gold has clearly been the leader. It’s been a great upside ride, and now it’s time for investors to book solid profits with a big smile. I’ve been adamant that gold is on the cusp of a two hundred year ‘bull era’. It’s themed around the love trade in China and India. For that reason, core positions should not be sold, but short term positions bought in the $1200 – $1250 area should definitely be sold aggressively now. Investors who are nervous that they will miss out on more upside action should buy call options while selling some bullion. Call options are like lottery tickets; if gold surges above $1350 and runs to $1400, the call options will rise in value quite significantly.

Do you stand with President Trump? If so, I would like to ask you to support #TeamTrump candidates for Congress all over the nation. I am running on a pro-Trump platform in Idaho’s first congressional district, and so far I have created an enormous amount of buzz all over the state. But in order to win, I have to get my message out to hundreds of thousands of potential voters that are not familiar with my work, and that is going to take a lot of time, effort, energy and resources. It is humbling to be in a position where I am forced to rely on others, and I am learning how to reach out and ask for help. If you would like to contribute to the campaign, you can do so right here. Every single dollar makes a tremendous difference, and no donation is too small. Fortunately, other #TeamTrump candidates are also starting to gain momentum across the country. Omar Navaro and Paul Nehlen are just two examples. If every Trump voter in the country donated at least one dollar to the campaign of a pro-Trump candidate for Congress today, all of us could have our campaigns completely funded by tomorrow. I recently learned that Americans spend 80 billion dollars a year on lottery tickets. It is so sad that people are literally flushing tens of billions of dollars down the toilet when they could be doing something constructive with it. Would you be willing to donate at least one dollar to my campaign? I personally see every single donation that comes into my campaign, and every single one encourages me so greatly. Right now, many Democrats are having absolutely no problems raising money. If the Democrats win control of the Senate and the House in 2018, they are going to impeach President Trump, and their donors smell blood in the water. And an effort may be made to impeach President Trump anyway if the composition of Congress stays about the same that it is right now. Many establishment Republicans would jump at the chance to stab Trump in the back, and that is why it is absolutely imperative that we get Trump a lot of friends in Congress in 2018.

From the latest ‘Trader’s Notes’, authored by Richard Breslow, a former FX trader and fund manager who writes for Bloomberg This was supposed to be the year traders were going to be hamstrung by political risk. When the late 2016 trends faltered in the new year, this was a common explanation for why. That theme has been swept away. Investors insist on living only in the here and now. After all, the bullets aren’t flying where they care. How many times have you been asked how much of all this geopolitical risk is priced in? The simple answer is, not at all. For every well publicized lottery ticket being bought on German yields collapsing after the French election, there are other traders buying euro upside believing the National Front can’t possibly get through the second round. And lottery tickets aren’t hedges. They don’t protect the mass of stacked trades being built up. At best they may provide a modest pricing buffer as everyone heads for the same exit

This is a good news/bad news story. Say you’re one of the many people who bought junior gold and silver mining stocks a few years ago – and then watched in horror as they fell day after day, week after week, finally settling at pennies on your dollar. Then, just as they seem to be recovering, you’re notified that some big miner with much less spectacular upside potential is buying one of your little lottery tickets for a premium to the current price – but a fraction of what you paid back in the day. You now own shares of Goldcorp or Agnico Eagle or some other household name, which isn’t bad. But it’s definitely not the 10-bagger you’d been hoping for to redeem your terrible timing. Well, get ready, because that’s your future. As Casey Research’s Louis James put it in a recent interview: The uptick is quite visible. Companies were running out of cash, pulling in their horns, operating in lights-on mode. But now they’re raising money and putting it to work. Resevoir’s deal with Nevsun was a real eye-opener, as was Goldcorp’s acquisition of Kaminak. I hear from contacts that the quality exploration companies are getting new CAs [capital advances] signed with juniors as well as majors. The latter have been cleaning up their balance sheets and are thinking of going shopping again.

It is well documented that the middle class of California has been migrating out of the state for well over a decade. A large part of the population growth is coming from births and foreign migration. Foreign buying of real estate has accelerated in the last decade and has helped to push prices up in many California cities. Many owners are enjoying the large gains in equity if they sell. You don’t get to enjoy that equity until you close escrow and some Californians are cashing in those lottery tickets and heading out to more affordable places. In some areas this is causing prices to increase. During the last bubble California was a big player in inflating Nevada and Arizona real estate as people were buying second homes and investment properties. This time, you are seeing people buying for long-term purposes of relocation. Not everyone is thrilled about this trend especially local families in said markets that now find themselves priced out. All this does is makes therenterfication of the country more pronounced. In Portland people are becoming active and placing anti-California stickers on real estate signs. Keep out Californians Many people need to stay in California because of work and family obligations. Yet when we look at the data we find that many homeowners are older in age. If you are able to find a lower cost of living state, you can truly maximize that equity lottery ticket you have. Taco Tuesday boomers are cashing in and are heading to various parts of the country. But when you have many people targeting one place, prices can and will get pushed up especially in the midst of a mania. Portland has become one of those target areas and some residents are not happy:

Submitted by Daniel Drew via Dark-Bid.com, Biotech has a special place in the heart of the gambler investor. In the modern market where the average investor doesn’t stand a chance, some of them indulge their hope and turn to lottery tickets. If only they can get the next Gilead or the next Amgen, they will become the next wildly successful “maverick” investor. More lottery tickets seem to be flying around than usual lately, floating alongside the recent biotech bubble. Some have doubted if this is a bubble. Maybe it’s different this time. The SF Gate pondered this exact same question 15 years ago, and the market promptly replied. On February 28, 2000, the SF Gate published an article called “Boom in Biotech Stocks Brings Back Memories of Bubbles Past, Industry observers say it won’t burst like it did in ’92.” The SF Gate quoted “experts” like Steve Burrill, who said, “Prices may come down 10 percent, but not 50 percent.” Earlier this month, Burrill was sued for embezzling $17 million. However, back in 2000, he was still an expert biotech investor. He noted, “We are still in the first leg of a biotech rally which we expect will last another decade.” Here’s what happened after the SF Gate published the article.

As you may recall we had the August option expiration for the precious metals at The Bucket Shop today. The call options at the 1100 level and above expired worthlessly according to the preliminary report from today. I have circled those in red below. As you can see from the prior day open interest, a goodly chunk fell by the wayside. The second chart shows the distribution of volume for both calls and puts for August gold. As you may have noticed in the warehouse report from yesterday, a rather large chunk of bullion in the JP Morgan warehouse was moved from registered (deliverable) to eligible (in storage not for delivery). This took what I call the ‘claims per ounce’ up to the rather high level of 117:1. This may be just a tease since there is quite a bit of gold laying about, but not deliverable at these prices, so I won’t be getting too excited just yet. I might have been more impressed if open interest had soared, or if some gold had actually exited the warehouse, rather than JPM just playing the old switcheroo with about 105,000 ounces of bullion that is still there. But the gold crowd is hard up for good news, so let’s make a big deal about it for a day or two. I am keying off gold here, since silver seems to be along for the ride. It may well lead the way at some point as I have noted, but not yet. After the usual price charts I show the current levels of gold and silver bullion in the warehouses. We may expect a little punch to the holders of new contracts compliment of the expiration, but most of that work in skinning the option players and knocking down the open interest seems to have been done. As a side note, rather than playing at options on the paper prices at the Comex, you might find buying lottery tickets to be about the same odds and more satisfying. At least it will get you out of the house or office.

Did Grinch steal the rally? It was just before Thanksgiving 2014. It should have been an ebullient time of year. Markets were already up nearly 17% year-to-date. Financial market junkies were quick to tell anyone with a wallet, that there would be a year-end rally. The December signal was a strong one, a number of folks stated, leveraging anything resembling a probability idea to buttress such claims. Adding to the recent mania, a high-tech era Stock Trader’s Almanac -known as Kensho- made its glitzy and cute debut that very few questioned. However they came out with a very definite and what would be a highly calamitous stock market call. Instead they quickly compounded and magnified the flaw in such products. On this blog, several weeks ago, we were properly cautious against such dangers of falling prey to data-mining excesses. Now we are positioned to conduct a post-mortem on the outcome of following such faulty advice, put forth by those mostly interested in getting you to make (more) specific and ongoing stock trades. Such excess trading is always to an individual’s own financial detriment (it’s perhaps amusing in the short run, but saving money over the long run should be more rewarding!) As I write this on New Year’s from Miami’s airport’s premium lounge, I can see a TSA employee walk past and purchase a couple Lottery tickets from a state-run kiosk at this international airport. I wonder how much precious earnings of this government employee (a position created as a consequence of 9/11) and that of other colleagues were being routinely dumped into that poor game of chance, further trapping them in such an inelegant position. Returning to our main topic here, on November 25, the S&P was at its own high level of 2065. Kensho said, with misleading precision, that the typical return of the S&P (from then to year-end) was 2.2%. Or a higher market level of 2110. Using November 25, the amount of days to year-end happens to be just about a week lengthier than that of a typical month (so about 36 calendar days). To then conform to the odd Kensho style, we looked at the previous 10 years of monthly data, standardizing each non-December “month” period to be the length of about 36 days. The number of these monthly data collected therefore is high: 10 past years *11 months = 110 historical data And the typical return over this history was 1%. Or a market level of 2086 (1% higher than our base-line level 2065). So for our analysis, breaking above 2086 would be our bogey. Kensho also provided other frilly statistics to falsely satisfy your concern. Such as the information that by then, 10 of the past 10 years the S&P was higher during this “Santa Claus rally”, though markets as we noted above has an upward tilt, so we might expect our baseline “return” to be higher, greater than 50% of the time to begin with.